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The You Tube video begins with footage of a man and woman in white lab coats behind a pharmacy counter. An ominous male voiceover says, “This is a pharmacist. Qualifications: 4 years of medical training and 2,000 hours of clinical hours.”

The 30-second spot then cuts to a heavy-set dude with a ponytail handling hefty-sized buds of marijuana from a glass jar. The same voice warns, “This is a budtender. Qualifications: No medical training and no clinical experience. But knows a lot about pot firsthand!”

The propaganda piece ends with the narrator nailing the point home: Medical marijuana in Florida will be dispensed by budtenders in pot shops instead of pharmacists in pharmacies.

SALT LAKE CITY (AP) — Hours after his wife pleaded guilty to misdemeanor pot-possession charges connected withtwo pounds of the drug found at their house, Utah’s Democratic candidate for governor is expected to talk about the need for a broader legalization of the drug for medical use to address the health issues his wife and others face.

The plea deal calls for a fine and probation rather than jail time for Donna Weinholtz, who was charged after postal workers found a small amount of pot she tried to mail to the couple’s home in California earlier this year.

Mike Weinholtz revealed the investigation during his party’s convention in April shortly after it began and said then he would push to legalize in Utah the medical marijuana his wife uses for chronic pain.

Many rural California communities have high expectations over the prospect of commercial cannabis cultivation, officially licensed by local authorities under provisions of the Medical Cannabis Regulation and Safety Act (MMRCA), which was passed by Sacramento last year. Humboldt County issued its first commercial cultivation licenses this summer. Now a less likely entry, Kern County in the conservative southern end of the Central Valley, has seen its first licenses. These were issued by the municipality of California City, where officials expressed some surprise at their own actions. “It’s a new industry for us. It kind of came and dropped in our laps,” city manager Tom Weil told Bakersfield’s KBAK. “It’s not something we were looking for.”

At least 15 cultivation sites in California City are to be granted permits, for starters. “We don’t have a lot of retail here,” said Weil. “But we expect with this business coming in that it will generate more jobs, more opportunity, more demand for retail.”

A medical marijuana initiative in Arkansas cleared two recent legal hurdles but still faces a tough race on Election Day.

And this time, legalization advocates have no one to blame but themselves: An internecine fight has made for bad blood between two pro-reform camps.

The result: Two competing measures on the ballot, confusing and seemingly splitting support in a state where the prohibition laws are among the harshest in the country.

“We have been fighting for five years to get this passed,” Melissa Fults, the campaign director with Arkansans for Compassionate Care, told HIGH TIMES. Her organization is sponsoring the Arkansas Medical Cannabis Act, an initiative that was the first to qualify for the ballot—and had the promised support of the Marijuana Policy Project, which can funnel important money into a state race. “Prior to having two initiatives on the ballot we were looking at a huge win, and now we are struggling for a win.”

In a pathetic attempt to persuade voters to go against an initiative aimed at legalizing marijuana for recreational purposes, Maine Governor Paul LePage emerged last week with a deceptive new video that suggests legal weed will lead to a barrage of roadway deaths and even kill children.

“Question 1 is not just bad for Maine, it can be deadly,” LePage claimed, right before spouting off some nonsense about how legal marijuana has contributed to a dramatic increase in traffic-related fatalities all across Colorado.

LePage then went on to try to convince viewers that people who use marijuana have a greater chance of becoming strung out casualties of heroin addiction.